Biro (November)

The novel that tells of the refrigerator without naming the refrigerator, as without the refrigerator the modern novel would not exist; that tells of a television, not just any television but ‘his television’, the box in the blue corner which introduced and contested his hundred illusions; that tells of his gadgets, their immobile personalities he switched off in November, or on in November; that tells of the washing-machine of survival; that tells of the typewriter he sometimes played like a piano, sometimes like a hammer, copying manically all the words that, blue miles, came out of a chewed nondescript biro.

Vase (November)

Taken from dust-filmed top shelf, bottomed out shadows bend where table meets shining round tower, then brownish branch and greenish stem coordinated loose magnified or minimised by 1700-degree heated silica cooled to room temperature clearskied, their eyelets and twiglets bunched stretched distended by waved geometrics of indeterminate style artist’s whim or company’s gamble, when fresh water too raises their thinned exposure, accentuates blemish blush as pond spectacle laid flat by tempest, and the glass-maker ingeniously ribbed upper storey so November grevillea leans backward spider leaves at rim airing tender skydives red curves, those and some scant lances of located lavender.

Knife (November)

Gift of Mrs Pamela Carswell, rare books and rare birds at the theology library, Ormond College, an elegant long Japanese stainless steel paper knife, used ever since for envelopes, uncut 19^th-century monographs, origami. Professional chefs say one needs only two (or three) knives for everything and mine was purchased in Elizabeth Street one November, what French call ‘office’, English prosaically ‘vegetable’: 3&3/4-inch blade, 3&1/2-inch moulded handle. About the oldest knife in continued use (cakes) is my grandmother Mrs Evelyn Hulme’s standard dinner knife: faux bone handle 3&1/2-inches, 5&3/4-inch blade, Thomas Ibbotson & Co. Owltic Sheffield, England, Firth Brearley Stainless. &c.

Bottle (November)

Still life with bottle. Red wine black with ferment. Grace said in silence. Then the day’s news: an unexpected diagnosis, visitors from another lifetime, a thunderbolt phone call. We examine our meals, tuck in. Wine animates the ordinary, flows understandably. Conversation is everyone’s turn, untying a few strands of our complicated city. November is cherries, too many for the bowl. And anyway (second glass) who invented the still life? Google it. One thing’s for sure, the bottle is vital. Thick at base, tapering above halfway. Stories flow from its lip. Sound of our voices flesh out meaning, alive to purpose.

Spoon (November)

Sometimes I may as well be N. He travels so many K whether it’s SMTWTF or S, then back. Friends text RUOK. They abbreviate to save time, while N’s lost the strength to finish words, city big zero O, emptiness that cannot say Y. XXXX, expletes an innocent bystander. People merge. Politician A could be B. Celebrity C may as well be D, probably is. November shrivels to N. Home at last his EPNS spoons sugar into T. It rests like Q in the cup, with no answers. O! U2 could be N, words not ending, early to bed, zzzzzzz…

Opener (November)

Abstract. The thesis proposes the opener adapted to changing industrial invention, of necessity. Socio-economic forces are analyzed, tracking progress from a means to an end to an end to means, most notably in the postmodern ‘openers’ of French enfant terrible sculptor L’Ouvre. Historico-political comparisons tackle that nationalistic can of worms, the Cold War. Is the opener lever or fetish? Insider or outsider? Indispensable or optional? Literary reference ranges from Murray’s cricket trope in ‘Boon’ to Hrabal’s lost manuscript, ‘November Beer’. Includes an appendix essay on ring-pulls and lid-flips, with consequent decline of the gadget, entitled ‘The End of the Opener?’ 

Paperweight (November)

The oldest domestic object in our house is probably a black stone paperweight inherited from my grandfather. It’s obsidian, most like. Over time it has held down unfinished essays, unpaid bills, adolescent sketches, secret letters… Itself is hundreds thousands of years old, whenever Victorian volcanoes vomited black blobs of stuff over the swirling land, sometime between the Big Bang and when my grandfather found it on one of his hikes. Let’s say November. My grandfather left me one other paperweight, oval glass with a sepia photograph of the pier at Phillip Island in the 1930s, where he went for holidays.

Computer (November)

The latest domestic object has settled well into its corner, in some places has its own room. No more need to dash to the postbox. Letters come and go lighter than a feather. Where were we before mouse-mind? Keyboard-consciousness? Paperless newspapers deliver terror bites. Letters to the Editor go into the outer space provided, till electronic doomsday. Downloads dazzle daily on the home entertainment ‘transistor’. Beware power surges! Holiday lightning! Forced shutdowns! Like other obsolescents, the Apple of our eye will turn microsoft inside. The object will need replacement. No backup, no upgrades, no transmission, November. Put it in writing.

Clock (November)

Its ridiculous alarm. Its tendentious numbers. Its very tiresome wakefulness. Its intrusive roundness. Its insufferable squareness. Its very insistent tic. Its Swiss manners. Its American omniscience. Its very Chinese structures. Its Monday predictability. Its November niceness. Its very millennial mindset. Its stressful accuracy. Its demanding precision. Its almost unnatural perfectionism. Its circus arms. Its unflinching face. Its very small brain. Its holiday countdown. Its examination blues. Its very unavoidable deadline. Its total indifference. Its infernal inference. Its very untimely entrance. Its entropic stupidity. Its fallible slowing. Its very abject stop-work. Its bung battery. Its dead beat. Its very sorry, not.

Saucer (November)

Isis: state without a capital, war machine without diplomats, ideology pursuing Armageddon. Saturday morning my wife says there’s been another terror attack in Paris. Online newspapers for 14^th November AEST keep using the word ‘blood’. Who’s in Paris? Kathleen maybe, she’s going to Lisieux for her thesis on Thérèse. Reminds me of Burton’s book she recommended, ‘Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789-1945’. Coffee spills into the saucer of my Persian-patterned French-style breakfast cup. “I have measured my life with coffee spoons.” Thoughts progress: this is drawing Europe into war, the atrocity spectacle cause for more conflict.

Jug (November)

Children have favourite words. Jug was one of mine, its slightly preposterous pronunciation, its curvy appearance. Is it Dutch? We poured homemade lemonade from a jug. In youth jug bands were encountered, ad hoc jazz bands invariably minus a jug. In November we sat English Literature examinations. The nightingale sang jug-jug. I had never heard an Australian bird go jug-jug. It was like Edward Lear. In my twenties I read Thomas Merton. He visited the novelist J.F. Powers. At dinner Powers’ daughters served the men beer in jugs. Merton, a Cistercian, admired this family scene he would never have himself.

Peeler (November)

The objects we throw back, higgledy-piggledy, into the second drawer of the kitchen. Cake icing tube. Ice cube tray. Wooden honey dripper. Gingerbread man template. Industrial pizza cutter. Miniature cheese grater, called amusedly “The Minor Grater”. Plastic funnel set. Roller rolling pin. Humberside tea infuser. Stainless steel wine-cap. Touristy hors-d’oeuvre fork. Four-sided kebab skewer. Stylish apple corer. Piedmontese garlic crusher. Swivel tin opener. Diamond-headed meat mallet. Rotary egg beater. Languorous salad spoon. Effective cherry-pipper, rescued every late November. Little sauce ladle. 1980s chunksville bottle-opener. Tea caddy spoon. Yes, but can we find it when we need it? The vegetable peeler!  

Iron (November)

The need to feel flat is universal. Our bodies are hills and valleys, ports and outposts, heartlands and extremities. But all this beautiful geography we cover each day with a selection of arty maps. The flatter the map the better, many even dressing for flatterers, such is their straight out-there belief in flat. We have a device to satisfy the need for flatness. Sight of a basket full of wrinkles gets it steamed up, the way November anticipates Christmas: a worthwhile job that must be done. It nudges daintily around buttons and zips, presses home. It has all points covered.

Comb (November)

Baldness has its pluses, e.g. no combing. One less thing to think about. But most of us are attached to our comb, every day. The word describes the action. Hard C as the implement is ground into the hair roots. O of take-off and M of humming smoothing pull-through. B, the silent departure from thick hair into thin air. The comb is ancient. It predates months, e.g. November. Fingers were not enough to keep hair disentangled, clean, and unknotted. Our partners had other parts to attend to than just ours. Women are more business-like, usually opting for brushes. And hair-dryers.

Doorbell (November)

Like all other cathedrals, Holy Trinity has no doorbell. Visitors and worshippers may freely come and go. The redbrick cathedral fills with enforced sounds of free-form piano. Even his silent five-minute arrival becomes part of Matt Mitchell’s abstract expressionism. He tinkles, power-chords, cascades, machine-presses… The pianist has travelled from the city that never sleeps. This is due in part to millions of doorbells. Is that a visitor, a worshipper, or a travelling salesman? Time out now, no need for anxious questions this November, his sounds his gift to cathedral silence and attentive visitors. There are jackhammers, taxis, ship-horns, chatter, doorbells…  

Drawing of Matt Mitchell playing the grand piano in Wangaratta Cathedral, by Bridget Harvey

Coathanger (November)

In one of those weekend celebrity questionnaires Laurence Olivier was asked for his pet hate. “I hate wire coathangers.” So many costumes to put on, take off, so many characters - little wonder their dependencies end in a heap. We contemplate our own wardrobe, the stark reminders of what we are not, the different personas we put on for the world and take off later. Even how many coathangers enumerates tales about our personality. You might be anonymous as a monk or chameleon-like as a fashionista. November spring clean’s a good time, storing away the winter coat, reintroducing tropical shirts.

Fork (November)

Saint Thomas Becket introduced the fork to England. The English Court, that is. My history teacher told us this, in 1972, in a portable during reconstruction, point being the Court found it an affectation, undeserving of attention in a world where most things hung on the end of a knife. Should I google this, November 2015? I haven’t the heart. That the martyr introduced the fork into England is comprehensible enough, though I’m open to learned articles. Shakespeare talks of us as a “poor bare forked animal” and Frost says the fork in the road “has made all the difference”.

Package (November)

There’s old-time religion. There’s really old-time religion. And religion old as Genesis. There are trad bands called The Lagerphones playing gospel, English cathedral worship remembering Zion, and there’s our very presence together, alive to creation’s wonders, our losses and finds. Then there’s new-time consumer religion, wanting the whole package now. There’s really new-time religion, judging each clicked revelation on its screen. There’s new-time anti-religion, rejecting all religion, would crucify it all over again for its preposterous pretences. There’s supermarket religion, but watch the use-by date: November 2015CE. Or religion of purely personal desire, relearning Genesis in no time at all.

Window (November)

Our houses share the sounds of life. Our kettle sings like a clarinet. Conversation stretches the length of piano. Saxophone steps the up and down of household talk. Percussion includes windows and doors, the everyday footsteps upon floorboards. But the digeridu has no walls. Gates and fences are incidental to its countryside. The Art and Beauty of Deep Listening takes us down into dried-out capacious billabongs. Digeridu is both snake and bird, desert and forest. Out our window we see November storms. They bring down big trees. Trees that, hollowed and hallowed in time, fill with the breath of life.

Superglue (November)

In the sixties simplicity went super: supersonic, supergroup, superstar, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, superrealism, supersaturation. Perhaps it was compensation for simply being Clark Kent, no add-ons. James Morrison Superband, fifty years after, is a charming afterthought, a combo stepping from a tardis in search of a name. Full houses can’t be wrong, as the supervisor has it; the supersleuths laid out the evidence in a perfect denouement. Unaffected by the green-eyed monster Kryponite, Superband did it their way, unerringly, as November always rhymes with Remember; stuck together as superglue holds fast the most disparate elements. The Daily Planet gave them a super review.